The two women who say they were sexually assaulted by the WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange would never have complained to police if he had agreed to take an HIV test, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

WikiLeaks’s Swedish co-ordinator, who worked closely with Mr Assange for months, said in an exclusive interview that he repeatedly begged his boss to have the test, both to head off the possible police investigation and for Mr Assange’s own peace of mind, given his promiscuous sex life.

‘The two women told me, that if he goes to the clinic for an HIV test,
then we won’t go to the police,’ said Mr Assange’s colleague, who
wishes to remain anonymous because he is a witness in the case brought
by Swedish prosecutors, which led to Mr Assange spending nine days in
Wandsworth Prison pending extradition.

Allegations: Julian Assange is accused of rape by two women in Sweden

‘I became the middleman in these negotiations,’ he added.

‘I felt that if Julian had agreed to have the HIV test, they would have dropped it. I told him, “Just do it, and anyway, it’s good for you, because you’re sleeping around”. A lot of women were extremely attracted to Julian, and after a few minutes, they offered themselves to him. From my perspective, they were like groupies with Mick Jagger, and he takes these opportunities.’

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The WikiLeaks co-ordinator said he felt certain that the two women – who both allege that Mr Assange forced them to have intercourse during the same week in August without using a condom, against their express wishes – had nothing to do with any supposed American intelligence plot to discredit him, as he has frequently claimed.

‘The CIA is not behind this at all,’ he said. ‘Of course it is a golden opportunity for them. But from the beginning, it was personal.’

He said Mr Assange refused to take the test until it was too late, when all the Swedish clinics had closed for the weekend: ‘Julian said, “I don’t like it when people are blackmailing me, and they are blackmailing me by threatening to go to the police”.’

Mr Assange also told him that he had spoken to one of the alleged victims, known as ‘Ms W’, assuring him that ‘she is fine, she won’t go to the police’. The WikiLeaks co-ordinator knew from his own conversations with Ms W that she was not fine at all, but terrified she had been infected.

Mr Assange’s British lawyer, Mark Stephens, said his client had taken a test for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases at a later date, which showed he was not infected.

‘If it is true that all the women really wanted was for him to be tested, and that this would have stopped the case, then it is very disappointing that it has got so far,’ he said.

Today, The Mail on Sunday publishes unredacted details of the sexual-assault allegations against Mr Assange. They may well dismay his high-profile feminist supporters, such as the American writer Naomi Wolf, who has claimed he is a victim of the ‘international dating police’, and Jemima Khan, who offered to provide one of the sureties that led to his release last week on £240,000 bail.

Our investigation also reveals that:

In the same week that Mr Assange had sex with Ms A and Ms W, he ended the relationship between a well-known American reporter and his girlfriend by blatantly attempting to seduce her during a dinner at a Stockholm restaurant. Having left the restaurant hand in hand with Mr Assange, the woman did not spend the night at the hotel where she had been sharing a bed with the American.

Mr Assange has lied about aspects of his work. At a public meeting in London, he falsely claimed that the ‘Climategate’ emails from the University of East Anglia were first published by WikiLeaks. In fact, the emails were published by specialist climate websites in America and Canada – yet Mr Assange spent several minutes lamenting how he had found publishing them morally difficult because they boosted the arguments of global-warming sceptics.

A senior journalist who worked closely with Mr Assange at the Guardian, and helped broker the deal that saw the paper become one of a handful of media organisations around the world with privileged, early access to successive WikiLeaks documents, has refused to continue dealing with him. It is understood that staff at other organisations, including Der Spiegel in Germany and Al Jazeera television, have also grown unhappy with his methods. One reporter said: ‘He can be extremely dictatorial. I’ve seen this first-hand.’

Mr Assange has been accused of dishonesty by key colleagues, including Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German computer specialist who was his closest collaborator for three years until he left WikiLeaks in September.

Mr Domscheit-Berg plans to publish a book about WikiLeaks early next year.

An advance copy of the publicity blurb states: ‘Not only he, but also other close colleagues could no longer put up with Assange’s high-handedness, dishonesty and grave mistakes, and got out.’

Allegations: Ms W left, and Ms A are accusing Mr Assange of forcing them to have sex without using condoms

Quoting Mr Domscheit-Berg, it adds: ‘The fact that a project this powerful is under the sole control of someone with Julian Assange’s personality structure is a tangible danger to informants and collaborators.

‘Our trust was abused, we were threatened, misled and intentionally kept in the dark. It is not for nothing that many who have quit refer to him as a “dictator” . . .

‘Justified, even internal, criticism – whether about his relations with women or the lack of transparency in his actions – is either dismissed with the statement, “I’m busy, there are two wars I have to end” or attributed to the secret services’ smear campaigns.’

Amid the claims by Mr Assange that the sexual allegations against him are an American plot, it has been forgotten that when Mr Assange went to Sweden last summer, he said he believed he would be better protected from arrest for leaking America’s secrets there than in Britain, and that Sweden would be the ideal place to base the WikiLeaks computer servers.

However, once he arrived, he seemed determined to exploit the ‘rock star’ status that followed the publication of WikiLeaks’ first huge trove of US documents, the so-called ‘Iraq war logs’.

On Wednesday, August 11, the day Mr Assange flew in from London, he was invited to dinner at Stockholm’s Beirut restaurant with the Wiki¬Leaks Swedish co-ordinator, the co-ordinator’s girlfriend and an American journalist who was travelling through Scandinavia with an English woman.

From the beginning, the American journalist told The Mail on Sunday, Mr Assange was unusually rude, and when he offered him a copy of his recent, well-reviewed book, he said: ‘Don’t bother. I’d only throw it away.’ After that, he says Mr Assange ignored him, focusing intently on his girlfriend instead.

‘He was acting as if she were a single girl on her own, though it must have been obvious to him that we were together.’

Up against it: Mr Assange arrives at Beccles police station as stipulated in his bail conditions

Later, when the woman said she was going outside to smoke, Mr Assange left the table to join her.

The American journalist, who spoke out on condition of anonymity, said: ‘When they hadn’t come back after 45 minutes I went to see what was happening.

‘They were standing very close together a little way down the street, and Julian was whispering in her ear.’

Even then, they did not come in. The group finally left when the restaurant closed for the night. The journalist turned round and saw that Mr Assange and his girlfriend were walking hand in hand, and when he asked him what was happening, ‘he dropped into a classic fighter’s pose, with his fists up’.

The writer spent the night alone.

‘Assange seemed to take pleasure in humiliating me,’ he said.

‘He tried to take this woman away from me and then spent the night with two other women later in the week. It’s extraordinary.’

On Friday, August 13, two days after the evening at the Beirut restaurant, Mr Assange had sex with Ms A, in whose flat he was staying. It has been widely reported that she says the condom he used tore.

But her full police statement suggests that the encounter began with coercion. After they returned from dinner, he began by stroking her leg, but moving more quickly than she felt ready for, made it clear he wanted full-blown sex, removing her clothes and ripping her necklace.

According to her statement, he pinned her to the bed and held her arms, while forcing open her legs. In response to her pleas, he put on a condom. But after some time, the statement alleges, she felt him ‘do something’ with his hands. It was only after he ejaculated that she realised that the condom had been torn – she claims, deliberately, by Mr Assange.

Mr Assange and his supporters have drawn attention to the fact that she did not go to the police for almost a week, that she continued to see him and allowed him to use her flat.

But among the documents in the police dossier is a statement from a friend of Ms A’s who alleges that on the Saturday, August 14, Ms A told her they had had ‘the worst sex ever,’ and that it had been ‘violent’. The following day, says her statement, Ms A told her that she thought Mr Assange tore the condom on purpose.

The Swedish prosecutor’s case suggests that Mr Assange has a peculiar fetish for having unprotected sex.

The second complainant, Ms W, had consensual intercourse with him using a condom on the night of August 17. But the following morning, she alleges, she woke to find him on top of her, having unprotected sex – something she had never done before.

The Swedish WikiLeaks co-ordinator told The Mail on Sunday that Ms A called on Thursday, August 19, to tell him that she had had sex with Mr Assange and that he had ripped the condom.

‘She said she was telling me this because Ms W had phoned her and informed her that she also had slept with Julian – and that he hadn’t used a condom. That was when she asked me to talk to Julian and ask him to take an HIV test.’

A tense series of phone calls between the co-ordinator, the women and Mr Assange ensued, lasting for much of the following day.

Even then, the co-ordinator said, the women initially intended only to ‘tell their story’, not to make a criminal complaint. But once the police realised that both women were alleging they had been forced against their will to have sex without condoms, the matter was out of their hands: ‘It became a police case, whether or not the women wanted to turn him in.’

Mr Assange’s lawyer, Mr Stephens, said he still considered it possible that Mr Assange had been set up by a CIA ‘honeytrap’.

‘Either by happenstance or design,’ he said the sex case was merely a ‘holding charge’ pending the unsealing of what would inevitably be far more serious charges by America.

He also claimed the Swedish authorities’ attitude to the case was ‘highly unusual’, saying that an offer for them to interview Mr Assange in Britain was still open. Neither women’s allegations were credible, he said.